Why Can’t Microsoft Close The Deal?

TechCrunch has another Xobni rumor this morning. This one says that Xobni walked away from a deal to sell itself to Microsoft:

But the deeper that Xobni got into the discussions, the less
comfortable it felt about its eventual fate inside the Microsoft
machine. The fear was that Xobni would end up nothing more than a
feature of Outlook. Microsoft wanted the entire team to move up to
Redmond, and was vague in its answers about what it had planned for
that team, or the product. In the end, the body language just wasn’t
there.

This rings true to me because I’ve seen this happen before. Microsoft has trouble closing deals because when developers and entrepreneurs see their future inside of Microsoft, it often isn’t pretty.